Better Distribution

How Does Your Distribution Center Handle Beauty Supply Fulfillment?

Not every distribution house is equipped to handle small, delicate items like beauty supplies. It takes data, attention to details and hardware working in harmony to ensure accurate and fast order fulfillment for beauty supplies.

The Many Pitfalls of Beauty Product Fulfillment

The beauty products from your shop have always been popular, but you’ve struggled to reach an accuracy level that you are comfortable with.

No matter how much you train your staff or explain to your current 3PL, your Wild Cherry lipstick is still getting mixed up with the Cherry Cola. You can’t blame any one thing, the two look so much alike, have similar SKUs and even tend to be near each other on the pick floor, but these little mix-ups are really hurting your reputation.

If that were the only problem, it might not be so bad, but you’re also finding that a lot of your cosmetics expire before you can sell them. You thought you knew you customers better than that and were more tuned into their needs by now, but maybe not. You sure are tired of having to dispose of expensive inventory, though.

The Right Tools for Your Beauty Product Fulfillment

Step One: Managing Accuracy

Really good beauty product fulfillment requires a few different components. First, there has to be an objective way to determine which item is needed (Wild Cherry versus Cherry Cola lipstick). Next, you need a consistent way to check items into and out of inventory. Last, you have to establish a rotation pattern to ensure that the oldest stock is out of the warehouse first, reducing loss significantly.

Your fulfillment service should be managing your accuracy problem by employing connected tools like barcode scanners that let pickers know if they’re trying to pull the wrong item from inventory. When pickers work visually, small things in similar colors are easy to confuse. This also handles your inventory issue. Every item that’s picked should be scanned as it travels through the warehouse, helping to keep your inventory count very precise.

Step Two: Reducing Waste

When you’re trying to move product, the time that cosmetics have before they expire can seem impossibly short, especially if your 3PL doesn’t know how to rotate them properly. By using the equipment laid out in the first step of this two-step solution, it’s a problem easily overcome.

Warehouse workers can give each batch of beauty products a unique SKU that helps them track it through the warehouse. When that particular SKU is up for distribution, they can’t skip it for another that’s easier to access. The next SKU on the list is the one that’s pulled next.

Using your long-term sales data or after establishing new sales patterns, your 3PL can go one step further and use predictive algorithms to help determine just how much of each product is ideal to keep in stock. You might not need 60 cases of Pumpkin Glow nail polish this year since you tend to only sell about 20 cases each holiday season. At the end of the day, it’s about ordering the just right amount to eliminate waste and still avoid back orders.

No matter what the size of your business or what industry you are in, our commitment is the same: Our business is all about your business. Our focus is on service and efficiency, loyalty and logistics. No order is complete and no job is done until we know everyone has been served and satisfied.